A: Most of my friends and family were engineers, so I started out like them, intending to major in engineering – but after my first semester I realized I didn’t want to spend my life doing that.

I started looking into business and finance, and there were a few finance majors in my dorm, so I got interested like that initially.

At the end of my first year I made the switch over to our business school, and then at the end of my second year I applied to the finance track.

Once I made the switch to finance, I spent the rest of my time after that going after internships.

Q: So did you do a finance internship after your 1st year in university?

A: Nope – I did some technical work for my family’s business and it had nothing to do with finance or business.

Q: Ok, so you have this engineering to finance background and you don’t have a business-related internship after your 1st year in school. How did you get any banks to take your resume seriously when you applied for internships the next year?

I also learned some financial modeling, basic DCF skills, public comps, and more by working for the investment portfolio and learning to value companies there.

All of this helped, but I realized it wasn’t enough by itself to land interviews – I needed to get leadership positions, so I focused on that and moved up within each organization by my junior and senior years.

Last-Minute Networking

Q: So you have this engineering to finance background, you have a couple relevant-looking student groups on your resume now, and it’s your 2nd year in school. How did you start looking for an internship?

A: I waited until the last minute – the spring – and suddenly realized that I needed to find some kind of finance internship ASAP to have any kind of chance at the all-important junior year summer internship.

I knew that asset / wealth management internships were easier to get, so I focused on those and cold-called around 20-30 different places in my area, with only months to go before the summer.

Q: I get a lot of questions on how to find contact information for these local firms. How did you do it?

A: I went to Google Maps and typed in “asset management,” “finance” and other related terms along with the name of my city until I found the names and websites of different firms.

This may sound silly, but it worked very well and it’s much easier to sift through search results on a map vs. Google’s main search engine.

Then I went to their websites, got the numbers and contact information from there, and started cold-calling the front desks – those were the only numbers I had in most cases.

Q: Wow, I never thought of using Google Maps like that before. How did you get around the gatekeepers when you were cold-calling? I’m assuming you ran into a lot of resistance if you called the front desks.

A: I called and asked if they did internships, and then asked to be put in touch with whoever was in charge. I would usually say, “I’m a sophomore at ________ and I’m looking to get some experience for the summer – do you have information on internships?”

A lot of it had to do with who the receptionist was rather than how great my “technique” was – sometimes they were helpful and connected me, and other times they were completely useless no matter what I said.

I tried each place at least a few times, but if I kept getting a “Sorry, I’m not sure, why don’t you call back later”-type response then I would put the firm lower on the priority list.

Q: And how well did this work?

A: Even though it was last-minute, I got an internship lined up with a wealth management firm with 10-20 employees, most of whom were financial advisors.

The internship itself was pretty standard for PWM – the same type of work you’d expect, with screening funds and investments for clients, creating P&L reports, and analyzing their existing investments.

Even though it wasn’t amazing, it was exactly the steppingstone I needed to move into something more closely related to banking the next summer.

Leveraging PWM Into Leveraged Finance

Q: Ok, so now you’re back at school in your 3rd year and you have this PWM internship on your resume, which is a huge improvement over nothing. How do you move from that into something closer to banking?

Q: Right, so that explains your resume. But how did you get access to financial institutions in the first place? You were at a school where hardly any banks recruited for front-office roles.

A: I couldn’t use on-campus recruiting because there was none at my school – so I had to network through my fraternity, alumni, and other sources.

Another source for names and contact information was a program at our school that set up graduates with alumni who worked on Wall Street – they brought back lots of alumni and we could contact them directly.

This is one of the advantages of going to a large school – even if not many banks recruit there, there are bound to be lots of alumni and other students interested in finance.

Q: You mentioned your fraternity – I’ve gotten some questions on the value of business or social frats for networking purposes. What was yours like, and how did you use it?

A: It was a social fraternity. When I joined as a freshman, there were lots of seniors working in front and middle office roles at banks, so I got to know them when they were still in school, and then reached out a few years later after they had already graduated.

A lot of times they put me in touch with recruiters directly, and I could get inside information on the recruiting process, how many students they wanted to take, and how to get an interview.

Q: So is that what you used to get your next internship?

A: Yup. I applied to a bunch of places, but ended up with an offer in the Leveraged Finance group of an independent financial services and lending firm – not a bulge bracket or middle-market bank.

I got it via networking with an alum from my fraternity, and then went through the standard interview process with them.

Interviews were definitely more technical than what I faced for the PWM internship, though they didn’t go too far beyond the “How do you value a company?”-type questions.

Q: So what was the day-to-day work like as an intern in this Leveraged Finance group? This was after the credit crunch and financial crisis had struck, so was there much activity?

A: There were actually a fair number of deals going on because we were working on smaller transactions rather than the multi-billion dollar debt offerings that stopped once the crisis happened.

I worked on a couple “big picture” research projects, screening companies in different industries – but I also got to jump on live deals whenever they needed help.

Since the group was small – fewer than 20 people – I worked closely with the Analysts and Associates on LBO models, pricing models for debt offerings, due diligence work, due diligence calls with CEOs, and I got to listen in on a lot of conference calls with bankers.

I spoke to my superiors and actually got some referrals to bulge bracket banks from them.

Q: Wait a minute, you didn’t get a return offer from your internship and then you turned around and asked your bosses for referrals to other places? How does that work?

A: It wasn’t that difficult, because no interns received return offers – they liked me, I had performed well, and they knew that market conditions were the only thing stopping me from coming back.

They had extensive backgrounds in finance, so they had no problems at all referring me to their contacts at bulge bracket banks.

Q: Nice move. So how else did you get interviews at bulge bracket banks?

A: Primarily through alumni – all my first-round interviews at banks were via alumni, some from the organization I mentioned before and some from my frat.

Q: By the time you were going through full-time interviews, you had the PWM internship as well as a Leveraged Finance internship.

Both of those are good, but you also didn’t have a brand-name firm or school on your resume. What kind of reaction did you get in interviews?

A: The question of my school and why I didn’t go to a better-known place did come up a few times, but interviewers were generally not demeaning.

It wasn’t a totally unknown place – interviewers had heard of it, but they didn’t hold it in high regard all the time, so the questions were more like, “Why ________?” rather than “Couldn’t you have gone to a better school?”

I usually answered it by talking about the extensive resources and alumni network they had, and how I wanted to do engineering originally.

My lack of “brand-name” internships didn’t come up that much – they were more focused on what I did as opposed to why I hadn’t worked at bulge bracket banks.

About the Author

Brian DeChesare is the Founder of Mergers & Inquisitions and Breaking Into Wall Street. In his spare time, he enjoys memorizing obscure Excel functions, editing resumes, obsessing over TV shows, traveling like a drug dealer, and defeating Sauron.

No one needs to know until you get asked specifically about it – and when you do get asked about it, just Blame a 3rd Party (see below).

There are some facts you can’t omit: “forgetting” your GPA raises red flags, as does months or years of unaccounted time on your resume.

But you need to omit some facts because:

Sometimes if you say too much you come across as negative, which is a big no-no in interviews and once you’re working.

If something does not help you, there’s no reason to say it. Remember, you’re there to “sell” yourself.

Hedged Exaggeration

This is “hedged exaggeration” rather than “exaggeration” because you need to be careful about how and what you exaggerate.

Write that you “Negotiated $50MM higher purchase price for client” on your resume and you’ll get called out very quickly – but write that you “Supported senior bankers in negotiating $50MM higher purchase price by revising valuation” and now you have an exaggeration rather than a lie.

Re-Adjusting the Focus

Studied abroad in Paris for a year, but spent 360 of those days drinking and 5 days studying?

Focus on the 5 days, or 10% of your time, where you actually did something worth talking about.

Blaming a 3rd Party

Didn’t get an offer? Had an unusually low GPA your first year in school?

That’s ok – it wasn’t your fault. It was because you didn’t fit in with your group’s culture – or because you had some family/personal issues but then learned how to focus and greatly improved your GPA in later years.

You also need to turn the negative into the positive with this kind of spin. Rather than focusing on how much you didn’t like your internship group, talk about how you like the one you’re interviewing with right now a lot more.

Pure Confidence

What you say often matters less than how you say it.

Try it yourself: make up an absurd story about your background and introduce yourself to strangers, keeping a straight face and showing no hesitation when you tell them your story. I do this all the time.

They may be skeptical – but they won’t call you out if you show no hesitation.

Put yourself in uncomfortable situations, and the more you do it, the more confidence you’ll develop.

How Do You Spin?

Ok, now let’s take a look at some examples of how to spin your way to success using these strategies.

Omission of Facts

Networking Situation: You’re explaining to an alumnus why you’re interested in investment banking, but you only got interested recently and don’t have a long history to point to.

Solution: Don’t mention this “fact.” Instead, talk about how you’ve known a lot of friends in the field and how you were always interested, but became even MORE interested when… [Insert recent event here].

On-the-Job Situation: You finish your work early and need to send out materials to your team, which they need by tomorrow morning. But you’re afraid to send the email too early or they might give you more work.

Solution: Omit the fact that you finished early. Either log in remotely at midnight or go out and do something else, and then come back to the office and send everything late at night.

Interview Situation: You get asked about the “company” you started last year. It didn’t go anywhere and you decided to shut it down because you lost interest – but you don’t want to seem like a failure in interviews.

Solution: Don’t mention how you lost interest – and never give revenue/profit figures. Just say that you learned a lot from doing it and had some success (building a product / getting publicity / customers) but decided to pursue other opportunities instead – which you never would have found out about had you not started the first company.

Hedged Exaggeration

Resume Situation: You don’t have any “results” for your most recent internship, and you’re worried that it will seem like you’ve done nothing at all.

Solution: Borrow other peoples’ “results.” You may not have directly impacted business, but you “supported” or “assisted” the senior guys who brought in additional assets under management, or that new M&A deal, right?

Solution: Say that you could help but you need to finish a client-related task for your SVP. He doesn’t “need it” by tomorrow but he sure would “like to see it” by tomorrow.

Re-Adjusting the Focus

Interview Situation: You get asked to talk about your investment banking internship, but all you did was create company profiles for a potential client and a lot of administrative work. But you don’t want to sound like you did nothing.

Solution: Say that you “Helped out with industry research, and worked on a potential buy-side M&A deal.” Position what you did as a potential deal that never came together rather than admitting it was grunt work.

Networking Situation: You’re meeting with an alum and you’re talking about your experience studying abroad in Japan. He asks about your language skills, but you spent all your time there at all-you-can-drink bars hitting on the waitresses.

Solution: Make up a joke to get around having to answer the question directly: “Language study? I was too busy studying sake. Oh, and I actually had a lot of tough classes that semester so I think I’ll stick to English for now…”

Resume Situation: You have a 3.3 overall GPA, but a 3.7 GPA in your Finance major – but you can’t round the 3.3 to a 3.5.

Solution: List your Finance GPA first and make it bold – then include a semi-colon and feature your overall GPA less prominently.

Blaming a 3rd Party

Interview Situation: Your group gave offers to everyone except for you because you came into work late every day and did nothing. You’re interviewing for another banking job right now and you can’t admit this.

Solution: Say that you didn’t fit in with your group’s culture. But everyone in this group seems much better.

Networking Situation: You’re speaking with an alum and he asks why you haven’t taken any finance classes before this last semester if you’re actually interested in the field. The “whole truth” is that you only became interested recently.

Solution: Say it was always on your mind, but that your major had some tough requirements. Turn it into a joke (works better if the alum also had the same major) and say that you could only pull yourself out of the library / out of the lab recently.

What Next?

Get out there and practice.

We all have skeletons in our closets – even if you haven’t gone Patrick Bateman on anyone, there are questions you’d rather not answer.

Figure out what your top 5-10 most “awkward” questions are in interviews or networking, and then think about which of these strategies you can use to spin your answers.

About the Author

Brian DeChesare is the Founder of Mergers & Inquisitions and Breaking Into Wall Street. In his spare time, he enjoys memorizing obscure Excel functions, editing resumes, obsessing over TV shows, traveling like a drug dealer, and defeating Sauron.

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